Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera!

It gives me great personal thrill to congratulate Srinath on successfully defending his PhD thesis in Computer Science in the area of management of large scale systems at Indiana University a few hours ago! I'm also a member of his phd committee and it was great to part of this historic occasion in his life!

Srinath is the root of WSO2 in many ways. As an intern at the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), along with Dimuthu Leelaratne (who's currently in WSO2 and is one of our security experts) and 2 others, were the ones who created AxisMora, a prototype re-write of Apache Axis1 to show that a pull-parser based SOAP engine could do wonders. In fact they got it to go 10x faster than Axis1. Srinath went on to lead the Axis2 effort that LSF ran in 2004/05 and then went to grad school in August 2005.

So, if not for Srinath .. no AxisMora .. no Axis2 and probably no WSO2; at least certainly not in the form we're in today! The seeds Srinath and company planted in 2003 have dramatically changed the world as we know it :-).

In fact, ALL 6 of the people who originally worked on Axis2/Java are now in the US working on PhDs in Computer Science! Going beyond that group, a total of more than 20 people who've gone thru WSO2 are now in computer science grad school all over the world (primarily US). That's part of the long term impact I wanted to have when LSF and later WSO2 was set up .. Srinath is proof of it working well :).

Srinath is the first to graduate from that group of people. Now we have a pipeline :). He's planning on returning to Sri Lanka soon, where I hope he will join WSO2 and help us compete even better in the world! (And also lead some projects in LSF to help others follow in his footsteps.)

Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera! Its been an honor and privledge to have worked with you and I look forward to many more years together as colleagues!